As the second anniversary of my weightloss maintenance on Jenny Craig approaches, it seems only fitting to consider the state of overweight and obesity in the United States. The news is not encouraging. New data from Trust for America’s Health says that Americans are continuing to get fatter.
Americans Continue the Get Fatter Trend in 2009
The Trust for America’s Health website, which I have not visited before, is quite an interesting read. You can click on your state, mine being California, and see all kinds of interesting things. Our obesity rate, 23.6%, ranks us #41 out of the 50 states. This isn’t too surprising, as Californians have traditionally been somewhat appearance conscious, perhaps due to Hollywood and the impossibility of covering up much in our warm weather. You can download the complete report, F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America.
If current policies are failing, what are we supposed to do? In their Blueprint for a Healthier America, the Trust emphasizes prevention. One problem here, at least for this diehard Skinnerian–where is the incentive? Physicians do not get paid for preventing, they get paid for treating. Yes, some of us just have enough good old fashioned willpower to stick to our diets long enough to be reinforced by being thin (oh I do enjoy buying size 4 instead of size 16 clothes!), but a lot of people are going to choose the quick fix over the long-term goal. But we have some very sophisticated behavior analysts out there, who do marvelous work with autism, so why don’t we put them to work figuring out how to slim America?
My insurance company, the absolutely fantastic wonderful USAA, sends me a rebate at the end of every year for not making any claims or getting any tickets on my automobile policy. That’s not the only reason I drive carefully, but the rebate is big enough to get your attention. What if we gave people rebates on their health insurance or even tax returns for making progress towards or maintaining a healthy weight? I wonder what Skinner would do….
1 Comment
hpetersen · December 2, 2009 at 8:55 pm
From a psychology standpoint, I think that your idea makes a lot of sense. If people were financially benefitted from maintaining a healthy weight, there would be a significantly greater incentive to do it. Additionally, if companies who produce food were to be taxed for using ingredients known to be unhealthy or unhealthy proportions of certain dietary elements, I think that they would start producing healthier food as a result. However, politically, I don’t think that either of these options would ever have a serious chance. People would call the health insurance reward policy discriminatory.
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